Dude, Where're My Students?

Today, I brought some new things for the apartment at Daiso which is just across the road. I ended up biking along the once-thought endless road. I basically continued on this path until I was pretty sure I was about to enter a harbor so I turned back.

I met the other foreign teachers to watch Dr. Strange at the Lotte Cinema. It was all of our first movie-going experience in Korea. The experience was pretty similar to when I saw Spiderman in Shanghai. English movie with subtitles! Purchasing the ticket was also pretty easy as it seemed the titles were in English and everything was displayed on a screen. The price was slightly less than a Cineplexodeon and heaps more than South Bank cinema. The movie was great too! Lots of cool visual effects!

I biked home and picked up some groceries on the way. I returned to discover the dryng function on the laundry machine had failed me. So I sat down and translated the whole thing piece by piece. Unlike the rice cooker this one made a lot more sense. At least the words did, I still wasn’t confident I had put in the right thing until the clothes came out dry. Job well done.

For some reason I took my bike to school. Like I thought I would be late, but I was 2 minutes early. Since the move I’m pretty much less than a block away. I can see the sign for the school out of my giant window.

When I walked into my kindergarten class there were only three students –out of seven. Two were late and two were sick. It was a very very easy morning. This is the only age were sorting words as verb, adjective, and noun is fun. They go “Yay!” when I start moving their magnetized vocabulary words down to the height where they can come up and take turns arranging them.

The elementary students in the afternoon had a level test to do today, so that was four whole lessons for one test. Easy for the teacher and so hard for the students.

The day concluded with the high schoolers, which as of lately have been my most difficult class. They performed very poorly on their monthly test and have been speaking Korean more and more in class –sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t be interrupting them! Not cool when they aren’t supposed to be speaking English at all. I first went in and got their phones in the basket, which makes a big difference. I was more firm about the Korean thing, but I didn’t have any plan on how to fix this going into the class. It was only at the end of class that an idea formulated. The debate topic was activities you prefer to do in a single-sex group. The three girls came up with: showering, going to the bathroom, swimming, running, and then dancing. On the note of dancing one student blurts out that another is an amazing dancer. After trying to coax her into dancing we agreed that if she spoke Korean again before the end of class she would have to dance. To make her accept this, everybody was included. Now whoever speaks the most Korean in class has to dance at the end. Also I am included in this, so if they can get me to speak some Korean in class and they don’t, then I have to dance. Honestly, I would do it if they could prove to be that coordinated.